Guest post written by author David Valdes
David Valdes is the author of the young adult novel Spin Me Right Round (Indie Next pick, Junior Library Guild selection, New York Public Library Best Book for Teens), as well as three nonfiction books, including Today Show “Top 10 Holiday Books” pick A Little Fruitcake. His plays have been produced coast to coast and abroad. As a columnist, he has written for the New York Times, Boston Globe, and HuffPo. He lives outside Boston with his teenage daughter. His new novel Brighter Than The Moon is out now.
In my new young adult novel, Brighter than the Moon, three kids find themselves in romantic trouble when they can’t distinguish what seems true or feels true from what is actually true. Keeping those distinctions clear can be really important in matters of the heart—but in fiction, the blurrier the lines the better.
A friend of mine finished Spin Me Right Round, my young adult time travel novel, and said of the narrator, Luis, “You’re just like him!” And then immediately asked whether some of the events in the book had really happened to me or not.
I understood both her exclamation and her question. I had put a lot of myself in Luis. We’re Cuban-American, gay, both of us very out, very expressive, and passionate about things. And he time travels to a high school very much like the one I attended. His time there is full of details so believable that you might be tempted to think the people and events are real. But, no, it’s fiction. It’s truthful without being factually true—which is absolutely the goal for writing based on an author’s life.
One reason they say “write what you know” is that doing so builds authenticity into the work. But writing from life can also be a stumbling block if you don’t honor the most important task of fiction: making things up. Trying to replicate real life exactly as it happened is more likely to limit you than to create compelling writing.
It limits you because you can become afraid to take liberties with the details; and when you are afraid to follow where the story leads, credibility goes down, not up. What someone said in real life may not suit the character you’ve created. A super specific detail that is meaningful to you might be too confusing to the reader. And some wild things that occur in reality might well seem implausible on the page. The defense “but it really happened that way” doesn’t help you—either it is believable in the context of the fictional world you’ve made or it isn’t.
Here are three strategies for making sure that you are still creating fiction even when drawing from your lived experience.
1. Don’t Tell A Whole Story
Instead of sticking only to events that happened, start to finish, choose memorable images or details from events that stand out to you. Let the needs of fiction determine your plot points and story arcs, while you mine life for the texture and color along the way. In Brighter than the Moon, my second young adult novel, I included hospital scenes reminiscent of when my mom was dying, from me rubbing lotion on her dry skin to decorating her room. But the character’s experience does not mirror mine in most other ways, because this is his.
If you find yourself hewing too closely to precise replication, it’s a good exercise to change up the setting (making use of the imagery of the new space) and/or to create whole cloth new dialogue that no one said in real life.
2. Use Composite Characters
I steal from my friends, family, and students all the time. By steal, I mean speech patterns, quirks, physical features, habits, and how they walk, sit, sleep, or eat. I remember once thinking a boy in my class had a cowlick that somehow made him look wistful; I kept that detail in my head for thirty years and just this year used it in a novel for a fictional boy who is completely different from the initial model in every other way.
In Brighter than the Moon, the character Shani is equal parts my daughter, a former theater student, and a friend of mine. In that same book, the character Ash was inspired by a friend in his 30s; since Ash is 17, there was no way the character could have fully mirrored the inspiration, but that’s the point: people you know should be launchpads for creation, not templates to be followed.
3. Free Yourself From Facts
In grad school, I wrote a short story inspired by the time my drunken father took my brother and I to the beach during a hurricane. I cannot tell you the make or model of the car, the name of the hurricane, which beach it was, or what beer he was drinking, so I made that all up. I created dialogue (things I never said) and gave it an ending that was a little neater than the reality. But this all painted a vivid portrait of how that day felt for the story’s main character and it felt as true as anything I had ever written before or since.
Put a store where there wasn’t one; create a storm when the weather was historically fine; make up a movie that didn’t exist; let your character attend a concert they couldn’t have. Yes, you can take that too far, making impossible things possible, and you might have a copyeditor call you out—especially on physical places or dates. But for the most part, fiction by its nature gives you license. That’s why you often seen author’s notes admitting such fabrications.
Drawing from your own life enriches your writing but it shouldn’t overtake it. Every detail you include should help readers better hear your characters and see their world instead of just recalling your own. Creating, not reporting, is your work; in fiction, imagination is the whole point.
